Portrait of Peril Page 8

  Mrs. Firth’s eyes cloud behind her spectacles. “I don’t like the idea of profiting from Charles’s death.”

  “Nor do I, but Charles would have wanted us to secure his position among the greatest spirit photographers. We’ll donate a portion of the proceeds to the Society for Psychical Studies.”

  “Very well,” Mrs. Firth says with a weary shrug. “I’ll leave it to you, Richard.”

  “Can I borrow the negative?” Mr. Trevelyan asks me.

  “I’m afraid not.” I abhor the idea of wealthy collectors bidding for a photograph of a murder in progress, and the thought that it will be used to perpetuate belief in ghosts is equally repellent. “It’s evidence in a police investigation.”

  “I don’t see why there needs to be an investigation,” Mrs. Firth says. “We already know who killed Charles. He told us.” She reaches in her pocket, brings out the torn page of automatic writing, and shows it to Mr. Trevelyan. “It was the ghost of a thief. He thought Charles was trying to steal the gold he’d buried under the church.”

  Mr. Trevelyan strokes his jaw as he contemplates the scribbles and random letters. “Extraordinary.”

  Because he sounds less than convinced, I ask him, “Have you a different idea about who killed Mr. Firth? Did he have any enemies?”

  “Um.” He glances at Mrs. Firth, obviously reluctant to contradict her.

  “If you know who done it, better speak up,” Mick says, “or else he’ll get away with it while a ghost takes the blame.”

  Mrs. Firth glowers. She seems stubbornly certain that her husband’s killer is a ghost, but perhaps she wants a ghost to take the blame because she’s guilty herself.

  “Leonora, we have to rule out the possibility that the killer is human,” Mr. Trevelyan says. “There’s a Miss Jean Ritchie. She’s started a club that debunks spiritualists. It’s called the Ladies’ Society for Rational Thought. She’s gone all out to make an example of Charles and destroy him. Perhaps she took things a step too far.”

  At last we’re getting somewhere instead of chasing ghosts.

  Mrs. Firth drops into a chair. “I know nothing of this woman! Why didn’t Charles tell me about her?”

  Mr. Trevelyan puts his hand over hers. “He didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Then you should have told me!” She pulls her hand away.

  “Yes, of course. I apologize.”

  Mrs. Firth slumps over the table, buries her head under her arms. “What else didn’t he tell me?”

  Mr. Trevelyan puts his manicured fingers to his lips; if he knows, he’s not going to reveal it, at least not while Mick and I are present. I want to ask him about his relations with Charles Firth, but I can’t bring myself to do it now, in front of the grieving widow who’s just discovered what may be the first of her late husband’s secrets.

  Instead, I say, “Where can I find Miss Ritchie?”

  “Her club holds meetings at the A.B.C. tea shop in Oxford Circus every Saturday at noon,” Mr. Trevelyan says. “There should be one today.”

  “Where can I reach you if I have further questions?”

  He hands me his card and smiles. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Barrett, Mr. O’Reilly. I’m as anxious to get to the bottom of this terrible crime as you are. Should you require my assistance, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  Mick and I rise, and I say, “Mrs. Firth, please accept our condolences, and thank you for speaking with us. If I might trouble you for one last thing?”

  She raises her tear-streaked, miserable face.

  “I’d like to see your husband’s studio.”

  “I can’t bear to go there. I’ll give you the key, and when you’re finished, bring it back and drop it in the mail slot.”

  * * *

  Outside the house, Mick and I look around Lonsdale Square. We hoped Hugh would be waiting for us, but he’s nowhere in view.

  “Should I go look for him?” Mick says.

  I sigh. “No. If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.” We’ve gathered that he wanders in obscure corners of the vast city, like a moving needle in a haystack. The times when Mick tried to follow him, he rode trains to major stations and lost himself in the crowds. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t get in trouble.”

  We walk to the high street. Although the traffic and crowds rival those of Whitechapel, it’s many notches up on the social scale. The building whose sign reads CHARLES FIRTH, PHOTOGRAPHER is one in a block of buildings with glittering display windows and white classical architraves, cornices, and parapets.

  “His previous studio was a bit of a hole-in-the-wall,” I say, unlocking the door with the key Mrs. Firth lent us. I suppose his spirit photographs paid the higher rent on this place.

  On the ground floor is a tidy shop filled with merchandise I would love to own. I touch the expensive cameras and study the lenses and accessories in glass cases. Everything is of the latest design. I’m uncomfortably aware that my own equipment will soon be obsolete.

  “Let’s help ourselves,” Mick says, not entirely joking.

  In the gallery of framed photographs on the wall, most are country landscapes, scenes of London, and portraits of well-dressed, attractive ladies and gentlemen. I study the few spirit photographs, all taken in a cemetery, apparently using long exposures at night. Translucent white wraiths hover in the deep shadows around mausoleums and stone angels. A little girl with ringlets, dressed in a pinafore and pantaloons, carries a pug dog. A man wearing the white powdered wig and knee breeches of the eighteenth century bows. The most striking is a woman with long, bedraggled blond hair, pristinely beautiful features, and eyes so pale they’re almost white. Dressed in a diaphanous white sheet wrapped around her slim body, arms and legs bare, she looks like an animated corpse escaped from a morgue. The images are so powerful that I can imagine myself in the cemetery, encountering the spirits of the dead. For a moment my skepticism is as insubstantial as the corpse-woman’s sheet.

  “What kinda evidence are we lookin’ for?” Mick says.

  “Letters, documents, photographs—your guess is as good as mine.”

  Mick climbs the stairs, and I follow him. Mr. Firth’s studio occupies the whole, large second floor. Huge windows and skylights have curtains for adjusting the amount of outdoor light that enters. Three expensive cameras stand on tripods beside flashlamps. Backdrops hang on rollers on one wall, and built-in cabinets cover another. Furniture, statuary, and live potted plants serve as props. The darkroom is twice as big as ours, equipped with running water and two new enlargers.

  “The lucky stiff,” Mick says.

  “He couldn’t take it with him.” Even as I remember his kindness to me, I detest the means by which he must have earned his luxurious studio. I walk to a cabinet and rummage through the costumes hung inside.

  “Looks like just a bunch o’ clothes,” Mick says.

  “Maybe not just clothes. Maybe proof that he faked his spirit photographs.”

  “Proof, like white sheets for dressin’ people up as ghosts?”

  “Or old-fashioned costumes to make them look like people from the past.” I hold up a ball gown that’s twenty years out of style.

  Mick opens another cabinet. “White sheets in here. And look at all these wigs.”

  The wigs are of every hair color, in both men’s and women’s styles, modern as well as antiquated. We also find wooden mannequins, stage makeup, and extremely realistic wax masks of adults, children, and infants. Because I don’t believe in ghosts and was anticipating evidence that Mr. Firth faked his spirit photographs, it shouldn’t bother me—but it does. He sinks even lower in my estimation. But my desire to find his killer increases. If my investigation exposes his fraud to the world, I’ll have repaid his kindness by destroying his posthumous reputation. The least I can do is deliver his killer to justice.

  “Well, this is plenty of proof that he were a crook,” Mick says, “but it don’t explain what happened in the church.”

  “I’ll search the
darkroom. You take the office.” As Mick bounds down the stairs, I pray I won’t find anything else that blackens Mr. Firth’s character.

  In the darkroom, I locate metal boxes that contain exposed negative plates. I take out plates and hold them up to the light. They’re all portraits, of people seated or standing, alone or in groups, sometimes with corpses in coffins. Postmortem photography is a common practice; I’ve done it myself. There aren’t any spirit images on the plates. Also absent are images of Charles Firth. Some photographers prefer not to be on the other side of the camera. I am one. Photographs of myself, such as in my wedding pictures, make me feel too exposed. Perhaps Charles Firth had his own reasons.

  I go downstairs and find Mick in the office, pawing through the drawers in the desk. He says, “Nothin’ here but bills and other business stuff. You find somethin’?”

  “Yes and no. There aren’t any ghost images among Mr. Firth’s negatives. So I can’t prove he superimposed them on his photographs of live people.”

  “How would he do that?”

  “By putting one plate on top of the other in the enlarger and printing them both on the same sheet of paper. Or by hiding a plate with a ghost image in the camera, then making a double exposure by using it for a photograph of his client. He must have kept his ghost negatives hidden someplace, or destroyed them after he finished using them.” That possibility disturbs me because it suggests that Mr. Firth knew full well what he was doing and took pains to cover it up.

  “Just because he had a shady side don’t mean he wasn’t a good guy,” Mick says. “He was nice to you. That’s important.”

  I smile, grateful for Mick’s attempt to comfort me. But I can’t help thinking that people are killed more often because of the bad things they’ve done than because of the good things, and I suspect that was true of Charles Firth. “Maybe the photographs he sold and published weren’t the only examples of his fraud.” I broach another troubling idea. “Maybe the photograph he took in the crypt was a fake too.”

  Surprise lifts Mick’s eyebrows. “How could he have faked it? There were only one negative plate in that camera, and we developed it and printed it ourselves. He couldn’t’ve put in the ghost—or whatever it was.”

  “He could have staged the photograph with an accomplice.”

  “Oh, you mean an accomplice dressed up like a ghost.”

  “But it still could be a photograph of his murder.” I remember the terror on Charles Firth’s face. I don’t think it was simulated. His only portrait that I’ve seen was taken at a moment when he felt himself in extreme peril.

  “And the killer’s the accomplice. Yeah, that makes more sense than a ghost who thought Firth was stealin’ his loot.”

  “We need to find out if someone went to the church with him that night.” I glance at the clock; it’s almost noon. “But first we should pay a visit to the Ladies’ Society for Rational Thought.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The Aerated Bread Company produces cheap, wholesome bread by pumping gas into the dough instead of using yeast to make it rise. I ate many a loaf during the years I was starting my photography business, living in near poverty. A.B.C. also operates tearooms throughout the kingdom, places where women can dine inexpensively and without a male escort. The branch in busy Oxford Circus evokes memories of trudging around London, taking pictures that I hoped to sell but rarely did. On cold winter nights, exhausted and discouraged, I would gaze hungrily at the fancy cakes in the window, then go inside and order a poached egg on toast and a cup of coffee. The A.B.C. kept me from starving.

  If we don’t solve this case and we lose our jobs, my friends and I can avail ourselves of cheap meals at the A.B.C.

  Now the window contains Halloween fruitcakes with prizes inside. When I enter the tearoom with Mick, the decor is familiar—walls covered with floral paper, the glass lamps on the chandelier shaped like poppies. Waitresses in black frocks and white aprons carry laden trays to customers who are mostly female; the few men seem out of place. Perfume mingles with the odors of coffee and sugary pastries. I call to a waitress, raising my voice above the din of shrill voices and clinking china and silverware.

  “Excuse me, where is the meeting of the Ladies’ Society for Rational Thought?” I ask.

  She points up the stairs. Mick and I ascend them to a darkened private room, where people occupy rows of chairs. We stand at the back of the room. At the front, a black curtain covers the wall behind four women seated at a table covered with a black cloth. A candle burning in the center casts weak, flickering light on their faces.

  “If this lot thinks ghosts are fake, then why’re they havin’ a séance?” Mick whispers.

  “Shh!” hisses someone in the audience.

  A woman at the table speaks in a sonorous, melodic voice: “Oh, spirits, come to us.” Loud rapping sounds interrupt the quiet. The audience gasps. The woman exclaims, “They’re here!”

  I can’t see where the rapping came from or who caused it, and I’m unnerved in spite of myself. Now I hear weird, screechy music, as if from angry cats singing. The audience shifts uneasily. As I search the darkness for the source of the music, the woman—supposedly the medium—groans and sways. The table slowly rises from the floor. Murmurs sweep through the audience. Up and up the table rises; then it suddenly crashes down. Everyone jumps, including Mick and me. I know there’s no ghost, but my nerves would be calmer if I knew how the trick was done.

  Leaning forward, the medium begins to cough. Her mouth disgorges a pale, filmy material. The audience recoils amid cries of “Ectoplasm!”

  As I think of the slime on Charles Firth’s clothes, the material floats up out of the medium’s mouth, above her head, billowing like an unfurled, translucent flag. Chairs scrape the floor as people stand, the better to see. A dark, hazy face shimmers in the ectoplasm. A woman blurts, “A ghost!”

  The audience grows noisier with fright. Mick and I gape at each other, our skepticism a scant defense against the supernatural onslaught. The music combines with eerie laughter and gibberish. Mick exclaims, “Look—up there!”

  A pale, glowing green hand flies about, swooping down on the audience. People scream and duck. When I fling up my arms to protect my face, the hand grazes my wrist with a cold, damp touch. It soars to the front of the room and vanishes. Another green, glowing object rises from behind the people seated at the table. It’s a head—bald as an egg, with dark voids for eyes and mouth. It howls, laughs, and gibbers. A frantic scuffling erupts, and chairs tumble as the shrieking audience rushes toward the stairs, carrying Mick and me along.

  “Wait,” the medium calls. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Lights, please!”

  The window curtains fly open, and daylight floods the room, revealing two women holding the cords. The medium stands and says to the fleeing audience, “Come back, and we’ll show you how the séance was done.”

  She’s tall and willowy, her thick auburn hair twisted in a casual knot, her voice warm and husky. Her imperious upper-class manner halts the crowd, which comprises perhaps fifty women, mostly young, who look to be shop clerks in cheap but stylish clothes and factory workers in humbler, rougher garb. They quiet down and nervously resume their seats.

  “Ladies, come out,” the medium calls.

  The curtains behind her part to expose three women dressed in black. One wears a tight cap that’s apparently made of rubber and covers her hair. The cap, and her whole face except for her eyes and mouth, are painted pale green. The second holds a violin under her chin and saws at the strings with a bow to produce the screechy music. The third wears a black veil and holds a contraption that resembles a fishing rod. From the end, attached to a string, dangles a green false hand.

  “These are our ghosts,” the medium says. “Allow me to introduce Emily Hammond, Ruth Lee, and Diana Kelly.”

  The audience bursts into relieved laughter. The medium says, “The ethereal glow is due to phosphorus paint. For the other tricks, I made the rapping sounds wit
h my feet.” She indicates the women at the table. The two on either side of her are holding hands with each other. “At some séances, the medium joins the hands of the clients seated beside her. They think they’re holding her hands, but not so.” She raises and wiggles her hands, which wear black gloves. “My hands were free to levitate the table, and to stuff this in my mouth and wave it over my head.” She holds up the ectoplasm. “It’s just a photograph printed on silk gauze. At some séances, they use flour-and-water paste or chewed-up newspaper.” Dropping the gauze on the table, she says, “So that’s the medium’s bag of dirty tricks. Now you know better than to be fooled.”

  The audience cheers and applauds. Mick and I join in. I’m glad someone is taking the time to educate potential victims of fraud, and it was a good show.

  “Please spread the word and invite your friends and relations to our next meeting,” the medium says. “And please stay for refreshments.”

  Women queue up at a table that holds platters of food and urns of tea and coffee. Mick and I join the queue. The medium glides over to us, smiles, and says, “Hello! You’re new here, aren’t you?” She’s pretty despite a face that’s too long and a complexion that’s all freckles. Her eyes are a rare amber hue, her lips like dark-pink rose petals, and she exudes vitality. “I’m Jean Ritchie, president of the Ladies’ Society for Rational Thought.”

  I’d expected Jean Ritchie to be older, mannish, and unattractive, like some Temperance Society women. I introduce Mick and myself, and when I tell her that we’re from the Daily World, she says, “Splendid! I’ve been sending our pamphlets to the newspapers, hoping for some publicity. Is that how you heard about us?”